Manufacturers and governments envision wireless communication between vehicles and road side infrastructure within the next decade. This communication will enable a range of safety, convenience, and business applications.

Unfortunately malicious or selfish individuals could abuse these systems. Our projects investigate how vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) face different security challenges than prior ad hoc networks and present novel solutions to a number of those challenges.

Challenges in Securing Vehicular Networks

While resembling traditional sensor and ad hoc networks in some respects, vehicular networks pose a number of unique challenges. For example, the information conveyed over a vehicular network may affect life-or-death decisions, making fail-safe security a necessity. However, providing strong security in vehicular networks raises important privacy concerns that must also be considered. To address these challenges, we propose a set of security primitives that can be used as the building blocks of secure applications. The deployment of vehicular networks is rapidly approaching, and their success and safety will depend on viable security solutions accept- able to consumers, manufacturers and governments.

Privacy Preserving VANET Key Management

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) require a mechanism to help authenticate messages, identify valid vehicles, and remove malevolent vehicles. A Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) can provide this functionality using certificates and fixed public keys. However, fixed keys allow an eavesdropper to associate a key with a vehicle and a location, violating drivers' privacy. In this work we propose a VANET key management scheme based on Temporary Anonymous Certified Keys (TACKs). Our scheme efficiently prevents eavesdroppers from linking a vehicle's different keys and provides timely revocation of misbehaving participants while maintaining the same or less overhead for vehicle-to-vehicle communication as the current IEEE 1609.2 standard for VANET security.

DoS Resilient VANET Authentication

The authentication of VANET messages continues to be an important research challenge. Although much research has been conducted in the area of message authentication in wireless networks, VANETs pose unique challenges, such as real-time constraints, processing limitations, memory constraints, requirements for interoperability with existing standards, extensibility and flexibility for future requirements, etc. No currently proposed technique addresses all of these requirements. After analyzing the requirements for viable VANET authentication, we propose a modified version of TESLA, TESLA++, which provides the same computationally efficient broadcast authentication as TESLA with reduced memory requirements. To address the range of needs within VANETs we propose a new hybrid authentication mechanism, VANET Authentication using Signatures and TESLA++ (VAST), that combines the advantages of ECDSA signatures and TESLA++. ECDSA signatures provide fast authentication and non-repudiation, but are computationally expensive. TESLA++ prevents memory and computation-based Denial of Service attacks.

Authentication of Location Claims in VANETs

In VANET safety applications, the physical location of a sender is at least as important as the cryptographic identity of a sender. Based on this observation, VANET safety applications require two new security properties: Convoy Member Authentication (CMA) and Vehicle Sequence Authentication (VSA). These security properties verify if a sender is driving with and is in front of a receiver, respectively. We propose protocols that provide CMA and VSA. We analyze and evaluate our protocols and conclude that they can detect a range of attacks and represent an important step towards enhancing VANET security.

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